Advocacy center to hold child trafficking conference

Submitted by Canton1 on

The Children’s Advocacy Center of Van Zandt County will host “Interdiction for the Protection of Children,” a two-day professional conference focused on child trafficking. 

The training workshops are presented by the Texas Department of Public Safety of Austin.  The conference is scheduled for Sept. 29 and 30 and will be held at Lakeside Baptist Church, Canton. 

Registration is free. 

Van Zandt County Sheriff Lindsay Ray and DPS Sgt. Scott Johnson, based in Van Zandt County, will offer opening remarks and share the practices and focus of area law enforcement in combatting the problem of child trafficking. Sgt. Derrick Prestidge from Austin will join a team of TDPS experts to present the two-day training.

“Interdiction for the Protection of Children” is designed to make patrol officers in law enforcement aware of the variety of resources available to assist them in establishing the status of a child who may be abducted or endangered.  The course has been developed through a combined partnership of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The target audience is law enforcement officers and other criminal justice professionals, prosecutors and the judiciary, including child advocates and Child Protective Services investigators, who are focused on the identification, prosecution and conviction of offenders.

Child trafficking involves the recruitment, harboring, transporting, or procurement of a person under 18 for labor or services for the purpose of involuntary servitude, slavery, or forced commercial sex acts. In Texas, this crime is committed both by criminal organizations and individual criminals who target male and female victims of different ages, nationalities, and socioeconomic classes.

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